The Demo Site

  Christmas is wonderful. Hallelujah. An escape from the office. A break in routine. But each year, by the end of a twelve-day stretch during which I have produced three meals a day for the home team of seven, plus many others, I feel as if I have run a culinary marathon. I would rather it were a relay race.
To find ways of passing the baton, I am turning to Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi. If anyone knows how to get children and teenagers away from their sofas and computer games, it is this pair. They run classes for 14s and under at the cookery schools attached to their restaurants in London and Bray, so they must understand juvenile tastes and attention spans; they also have two sons, Giorgio, nine, and Flavio, seven.
"I'm a bit embarrassed," confesses my 10-year-old, George, as we set off for their home in Gerrard's Cross. "I only know how to cook Coco Pops and scrambled eggs." ("Cooking" Coco Pops, should you want a recipe, involves putting them in a bowl and adding milk; not a dish likely to win Junior Masterchef.) Christabel, my 14-year-old daughter and her friend Harriet are at the more advanced, but messy, stage of taking over the kitchen to produce stir fries and endless cup cakes. Both the beginner and the enthusiasts will, I hope, be inspired to share the burden of catering so that I can attend to the urgent business of my Christmas jigsaw, a Breughel winter scene.
The other aim of this exercise is to find alternatives to the soul-destroying ritual of serving up Christmas pudding, sprouts, stuffing, etc, only to find, after two hours of window-blurring steam and sweat, that the ingrates ask: "Can you cook some peas? Mind if I have a fromage frais instead?" Even the spirit of goodwill towards little angels instilled by carols from King's cannot survive such treachery.
The Caldesis are up for the challenge. Katie, from Eastbourne, learnt to cook English classics as a child, with a touch of Cordon Bleu from her mother's monthly magazines: "She always asked me to taste the vinaigrette and tell her if it needed anything; it was a good way to get me interested." Giancarlo's upbringing near Montepulciano involved burning himself on the bread oven, aged two, skinning rabbits and making pasta. They met in 1996 when she came to paint murals at his London restaurant, and the rest is polenta alla Toscana with a British accent. As a cookery writer, she follows the principle: "If I can learn to make this, so can you."
In advance, Katie emails a list of recipes designed both to get children working, and tempt them into being more adventurous. Seafood boats, mini pizza puffs, filo pastry purses with cheddar and ham, and pigs in blankets for the younger ones; spicy sprouts, sausage stuffed mushrooms, and potatoes with onions and pancetta to provide a challenge for the older ones. For the finale, she suggests Semi-freddo alla Nutella – a frozen pudding flavoured with every child's favourite chocolatey drug. This has proved a big hit in The Italian Cookery Course, her latest book.
Should her ideas hit the spot, I shall still be heaving large birds in and out of the oven, poking cloves into my traditional baked ham, and trying to be inventive with leftovers. But I should be less likely to slice off the top of my index finger due to over-work – as I did, with a theatrical flourish, three Christmases ago. (A trip to A & E in a velvet dress was fun once, but not something I wish to do every year.)
The Caldesi's kitchen is heaven. Boiling water, ice and espresso are available on tap by pressing different buttons. But this is not the Science Museum, there is work to do – and the children are going to do it. Flavio is put to work wrapping bacon around sausages for the pigs in blankets. "Give young children scissors to cut bacon, not knives," Katie advises.
George and Giorgio start dismembering little gem lettuces for the hulls of seafood boats. Essentially, this is an assembly job, ideal for fusspots since those who don't like prawns, smoked salmon, quails eggs, avocado, or cucumber can leave the offending ingredient out. The sauce is a classic Marie-Rose: mayonnaise-based with a bit of ketchup and Worcester sauce for colour and flavour. There is also the unusual addition of "a few drops of tobacco", but this turns out to be a vagary of the spell-checker on the Caldesis' computer; if you look up the recipe on-line, it should say Tobasco.
The girls, meanwhile, are separating ten eggs. The yolks are needed for the semi-freddo; the whites can be used for meringues, which Katie is planning to decorate – her art school background coming to the fore – with almonds, shiny balls and orange peel strips to make mice. While Giancarlo prevents the girls curdling the custard, we women crack open the champagne. "They are actually doing it," Katie whispers, pointing at the busy boys.
Her children are seasoned cooks. "I've been writing cookery books all their lives," she explains, "so I have always involved them in recipe testing. That way I don't have to get down on the floor and play with Lego." She has almost suceeded too well. When she hasn't been able to find a babysitter during cookery demonstrations, the boys tend to leap on stage. "I can't hiss 'Sit down' because I have a microphone clipped to my apron," so she smiles sweetly while the culinary prodigies demonstrate pasta-making.
Talking of which, our last attempt at pasta resulted in grey stodge. Giancarlo quickly whips some up in the food processor, using one egg to 100gms of 00-flour. It works a treat. For brunch on Christmas Day he is making fresh lasagne with his mamma's ragu, using Italian sausages, fennel seeds and bechamel.The main meal, however, will be cooking turkey a la Eastbourne, just as Katie's mother used to make it, upside down for the first part of the cooking so it doesn't dry out, and unstuffed so it cooks quickly. Giancarlo is resigned to doing without an Italian capon. "If you live in a country," he says, "you either go with the flow, or you leave."
Stuffing will come on the side: sausagemeat balls flavoured with fried onion and garlic, then mixed with fresh herbs, breadcrumbs and parmesan, which the girls are currently pressing into mushroom cups before baking. The boys, meanwhile, are cutting out rounds from ready-made puff pastry, and blobbing tomato sauce and cheese on top; they then paint filo pastry with butter, and scrunch them into parcels containing cheese and ham.
An hour has passed. They drift off to play snowballs, but the girls are going strong with the shredded sprouts, fried up with pancetta and chilli, then stewed in stock. Finally, they tackle the Italian alternative to roast potatoes – fried up with pancetta and onion. Lunch is ready. Half of it has been eaten before it reaches the table, the rest quickly disappears. On the principle of "If I've made it, it must be good" even my George, a renowned vegetable-phobe, likes the sprouts. As for the Nutella pudding, look no further for a guaranteed success. Jigsaw, here I come.